


how or when or why

by rain_sleet_snow



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, During Canon, F/M, Falling In Love, Mourning, Originally Posted on Tumblr, Religion, oh no she's hot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-04
Updated: 2017-08-04
Packaged: 2018-12-11 05:51:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,261
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11708130
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rain_sleet_snow/pseuds/rain_sleet_snow
Summary: Cassian struggles to quantify falling in love with Jyn.





	how or when or why

**Author's Note:**

  * For [incognitajones](https://archiveofourown.org/users/incognitajones/gifts).



> Written for incognitajones to the prompt included in the text.

_a thing is brought forth which we didn’t know we had in us,_  
so we blink our eyes, as if a tiger had sprung out     
and stood in the light, lashing his tail.

 

Cassian can’t remember the way it happened: how or when or why. He can’t trace its beginnings, or find its roots. There is no obvious starting point. If there was one, he’d have found it: he has searched his memory for it, night after night, lying in the shuttle from Eadu as Jyn seethes at the opposite end of the cabin, trying to sleep after the destruction of the Holy City as Chirrut prays and Baze mourns. He thinks Jyn was praying then, too - he noticed the crystal early on, the one she never lets go of, the one she must have starved and fought to keep, and that night she was holding onto it very tightly. He thinks it might have been her mother’s. He thinks it’s a way of keeping faith with the Force, which has let Jyn and Lyra Erso down at every turn.

Lyra Erso is a footnote in all the briefings Cassian has ever read about Jyn or her father, but she is not quite forgotten, in the specific circles Galen moved in. She seems to have been far too vivid for that, and far too dangerous. People who are no longer in Imperial favour but who once knew the family, if carefully prompted, talk of a straightforwardness and a magnetism and a certain ambiguity that Lyra Erso possessed, a risky affinity for the Force. And Chirrut confirmed for Cassian that the crystal Jyn wore around her neck was the seed component of a Jedi’s lightsabre.

Cassian has nothing of his parents but their genetic material, and Jyn has carried her mother’s necklace for twenty years.

Cassian, trying to understand the way he’s drawn to this woman, thinks that maybe a reluctant admiration for that stubbornness is where he started.

Oh, she’s pretty. Yes, she’s very pretty, even when she’s grimy and murderous. But Cassian’s seen pretty before, he’s seen beautiful; he’s seen grace and elegance and animated smiles and laughter, and none of it draws him the way the tenacious set of Jyn’s jaw and soft mouth does, or the wary intelligence in those grey-blue-green eyes, or the easy brutality of her movements with truncheons in her scarred hands. Her good looks draw him to her, but it’s an attraction that should be easy to resist.

(It isn’t.)

Maybe it’s because she’s honest. She’s a liar who tells him the truth about what she thinks and feels. She can’t seem to help it, though she tries: even  _it doesn’t_   _matter if you don’t look up_  tells Cassian a lot that he didn’t need to know about the scars Jyn’s life has left on her. She throws out words in an accent still heavily tinged with the Core, and they’re awkward and real and truthful: even when they hurt. Especially when they hurt.

There are days when Cassian is not sure what the truth is, when he barely knows what he’s saying. Perhaps he likes her so much because she always knows. Jyn’s moral compass points in one direction only, even when she’s trying hard to ignore it, and Cassian - who has so much blood on his hands, gore beneath his fingernails and clots wrapped around his thumbs - finds a new certainty in that. He shouldn’t; he was the one who called Jyn selfish and foolish for her willingness to ignore the Empire, he was the one who wrote her off as nothing but a grifter who would never see the meaning of the Rebellion, but her newfound willingness to turn and fight doesn’t leave him exasperated by her sudden conversion. It gives him new faith.

He believes in her. Jyn’s open eyes make her easy to believe in; maybe everything else he feels follows on from that.

Draven wouldn’t like any of this, but he’d like that least of all. That’s fine. Cassian long ago came to the conclusion that there are things Draven doesn’t need to know, like jeopardising the mission to Saw Gerrera by shooting one of his lieutenants to save Jyn, like imperilling their escape from Jedha by going back for Jyn, like climbing up to a platform under fire to find Jyn crouching beside her father’s body and get her out of there. Jyn stopped being necessary to Draven’s mission a long time ago, but Cassian’s priorities no longer match Draven’s as well as they should. They are far more closely aligned with Jyn’s.

And she’s right. Maybe that’s why he likes her. She’s reckless and she’s daring and she’s right: getting those plans off Scarif is their only chance to stop the Death Star.

She’s also going to be let down, again, by an Alliance afraid of bold action and incapable of seeing that they need to get their retaliation in first, this time. Bail Organa is ready to act - Cassian can see it. Mon Mothma backs Jyn’s arguments - Cassian can see that too. But none of it will be enough.

Cassian doesn’t know what he sees in Jyn, or why he sees it, or when or how it happened: but he believes in her, and he believes that she’s right.

He leaves the council room when she isn’t looking and gathers her an army. It’s not as hard as he might have expected.

Jyn’s eyes are wide open when he tells her what he’s done, and Cassian sees something new there, something he hadn’t thought he’d ever be lucky enough to see, not after holding her father’s head in the sights of his rifle. (He wonders if she thinks the same things:  _how, when, why?_ )

They are drawn to each other. They circle each other like planets with complementary orbits.

“I’m not used to people sticking around when things go bad,” Jyn says, and there’s a wonder in her voice, a brightness in her eyes. He’s close enough to see a faint scar on one cheekbone, the fine lines that should be for smiling at the edges of her eyelashes, the dawning edge of warmth on her lips as they shape her words, and he’d like to know what she can see. If he asks she’ll tell him.

“Welcome home,” he says. He means it, even when it makes his breath skip, even when his heart makes the single most childish promise he’s ever signed his name to.

They’re going to survive this.

It’s stupid to make predictions like that, foolish to demand things of fate. Cassian thinks he probably believes in the Force, although he’s never really had religion, not the way Jyn does, and has no theological backing for this firm conviction that making promises is for children and idiots. He just knows, as anyone who goes into battle does, that counting on the future is handing all your chances for sweetness to the dead.

Cassian hasn’t had many chances for sweetness, though, and regardless of whether he has to postpone this one or not, he’s going to hang on to it tightly. He wants to know what honesty tastes like. He wants to know what you see in open eyes if you smile at them. He wants to know what stubbornness is like when it’s meant to shield you.

“Let’s go,” Jyn says. She looks exhilarated, and her eyes still rest on his with a collection of questions Cassian knows by heart - _how, when, why?_

After Scarif, maybe they can answer them together.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm on tumblr at [ rain-sleet-snow](https://rain-sleet-snow.tumblr.com/). Come and say hi! :)


End file.
